The Towerlight ? Q&A with 'Black Hawk Down' author Mark Bowden

Anthony Barsotti/ The Towerlight

Mark Bowden, the author of the award-winning work ?Black Hawk Down: A Story of Modern War? and former contributor for The Philadelphia Inquirer spoke to Towson about the Iran hostage crisis.

The Towerlight sat down with him to discuss his approach to creative nonfiction.

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Towerlight: Do you have any advice for college students about writing and why writing is so important?

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Mark Bowden: I think most people understand the importance of good writing and reporting. It is an invaluable part of a democracy and people want to know exactly what is happening, and I think that independent journalists fill a role that cannot be filled by anyone else.

It is clearly important, but more importantly for me, it is fun.

I grew up in the suburbs and I grew up thinking that the rest of the world and the real interesting things were somewhere else.? Now that I have spent my adult life going somewhere else, and I am finding out and trying to answer those questions: How did this happen? Why did this happen?

Even from the early days from very simple, local stories to much larger and in-depth international kind of stuff.

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TL: How often to you feel that college students should read and write?

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MB: The more you do it, the better you get at it, and I think that it is very important to write for publications because if you are aware that people are going to read what you are writing, you will take a lot of care with it.? It is also a really great experience to make an idiot out of yourself because it teaches you valuable lessons about being careful, being smart, about taking the time to polish what you have written so there is no substitute to it.? I compared writing earlier to furniture making.? You?re not going to turn out a beautiful chair the first time you sit down.? From time and practice and learning from writers that you admire, that will turn you into a much better writer.

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TL: What made you make the shift from journalism to more public relations/creative writing?

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MB: Well, I have always wanted to write creatively, and newspapers initially were not very receptive to that. But that changed by the time I was 30 years old working at the Philadelphia Inquirer. They were mainly interested in creatively written stories, and so I really had the opportunity then to experiment and work on stories and work on my writing and improve on both my reporting and my writing and to take on subject matter just because they gave me an opportunity to write about them in an interesting or compelling way.

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TL: What do you want to communicate to college students by going out and speaking to them?

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MB: I think that if I had met me when I was younger, I would have felt encouraged. I didn?t really have an opportunity when I was younger to talk to and meet the people that were doing the kind of work that I wanted to do.? I found those occasions when I did get to meet somebody it was always very encouraging to me, if only because I realized that it was just a person.? The people who do this for a living are not from another planet, and they are just like me. They?re just older and they have been doing it longer and they have gotten better at it. I think it?s inherently encouraging.

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TL: What are your plans for future work?

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MB: I?ll be writing books until I keel over or lose my ability to think coherently.? That?s what I do. That?s what I love to do, from books to magazine articles. I will probably slow down a little bit as I get older, but I will always be writing.

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